Russian billionaire’s $4.5bn divorce could be biggest in history

A Russian businessman is appealing a Swiss court’s ruling to pay more than $4.5 billion – half of his assets - to his ex-wife in what has already been branded as possibly the biggest divorce deal in living memory.

Dmitry Rybolovlev, an owner of the French soccer club AS Monaco,
must pay about 4 billion Swiss francs (just over $4.5 billion) to
ex-wife Elena Rybolovleva, a Geneva court ruled on May 13. The
Rybolovlevs didn’t sign a marriage contract, and according to
Swiss law, all their property is now considered as marital
property. Thus, Elena is entitled to half the fortune he made
during their marriage.

Divorce proceedings between Dmitry and Elena Rybolovlev, both 47,
began in 2008 after 23 years of marriage, when Forbes estimated
the oligarch’s wealth at $12.8 billion.

Elena Rybolovleva demanded $6 billion from the man known as the
‘fertilizer king’, whose fortune from potash mining once made him
the world's 79th-richest person, while currently her ex-husband
is ranked 147th on the Forbes list.

Apart from a huge bulk of the oligarch’s assets, the court
granted his former spouse with property worth 130.5 million
francs ($146 million) in Gstaad, Switzerland, where the couple
owned two luxurious chalets. The ex-wife was also given two other
real estate objects in a prestigious area of Geneva, Cologny.

Elena Rybolovleva’s lawyer Marc Bonnant called the process "the
most expensive divorce in history."

"No one — not even a Russian tycoon who put his fabulous
fortune into legal structures such as trusts and offshore
companies — is above the law," Bonnant and two other lawyers
in the case, Corinne Corminboeuf Harari and Caroline Schumacher,
said in another statement.

The billionaire has already appealed the ruling. His lawyer
Tetiana Bersheda pointed out that part of the billionaire’s
fortune was transferred into trusts outside Switzerland before
his wife could launch legal proceedings in Geneva.

“The real stakes of this dispute are abroad and not in
Switzerland,” Bersheda said as quoted by the Local on
Tuesday.

Plus, she said that the settlement is “not definitive” due to the
two-level appeal in Switzerland praising the judge for
"confirming both the validity of the trusts created by Mr.
Rybolovlev and the validity of the asset transfer to them that
occurred long before his wife initiated divorce
proceedings."